Political Booknotes Reviews
Beschloss, Alan Murray, Joseph Califano, and Michael R.
Political Booknotes Thank You for Smoking Christopher Buckley Random House, $22 By Alan Murray The reason good Washington satire is so rare is that Washington does such a good job of satirizing...
...Well, let's go to the range on Wednesday," he tells Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was also on the show...
...In this retelling, the descendants of TR trailed off: "It was always a matter of living with the memory of a man who seemed to ask them...
...This "made the family, in Tolstoy's formulation, unhappy in its own distinctive way...
...In canonizing such a man, the followers have applied "deviancy down" (to borrow Pat Moynihan's vivid phrase) to leadership in America...
...Pope John XXIII against Celestine V (the only Pope forced to resign...
...Garry Wills' 18th book is a series of vignettes about individuals he considers leaders in a catalogue of enterprises, counterpointed against snapshots of non-leaders—in the author's jargon, "antitypes...
...As in Collier's earlier books, the most memorable passages in The Roosevelts concern the striving of later generations to defeat or conform to the standards set by the patriarch, usually falling short in both...
...All of this is told with a delicious eye for subtlety that comes from Buckley's own intimate knowledge of the capital, and he captures the faddish nature of what passes for serious debate in Washington...
...Click back to May 1 and there's Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, on "Meet the Press," inviting President Clinton, Treasury Secretary Bentsen, host Tim Russert and anyone else who's interested to come with him to the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club on Wednesday so he can show them graphically how the 19 assault weapons that Congress wants to ban don't make any bigger holes than those that wouldn't be banned...
...More than his earlier books, it demonstrates the strange paradox of political dynasties in a democracy: We long to give office to the descendants of great figures and then are somehow startled to discover that the offspring of self-absorbed and power-seeking figures do not always have the instincts and talents that leadership requires...
...Naylor and two friends who are lobbyists for the alcohol and firearms industry comprise an informal Mod Squad—short for "Merchants of Death"—and they verbally joust over which industry is most disliked, which gets the most hate mail, and which is responsible for more deaths...
...a more searching question is whether the leader believes in the followers...
...The recent adulation of Richard Nixon in death is revealing as to why the nation suffers from a dearth of leaders...
...But such victories are notable because of their infrequency...
...It is not, as was John Gardner's work On Leadership, an attempt to explore the elements of leadership and tap those of special relevance today...
...Before they came to the subject, books on famous American families tended almost always toward antiquarianism...
...Those failures in marriage and commerce are presented here in full...
...Eleanor Roosevelt against Nancy Reagan...
...what they had done with their lives and why they hadn't managed to be as happy and productive as he had been...
...He did it by making the issue lower taxes, appealing to the American resentment of government, and harnessing the libertarian streak in our people while fanning religious fervor among those eager to set moral and social standards for every American...
...The hero of this odd story is Nick Naylor, whose career as a TV newsman comes to an end on the day he happens to overhear a radio report that "Rover," the Secret Service's codename for the president, has choked to death on a piece of meat at Camp David...
...Roosevelt wanted to win a war and stamp out fascism and anti-Semitism— and he had a united nation behind him, as millions of young Americans went into the military, millions more worked in defense production at home, and Hollywood and the news media went after Hitler and his assault on the Jewish people with a single-mindedness inconceivable today...
...Well it was you who did so much to advance the cause of mental health, gushes Hillary...
...Now click back two months to "Nightline," where Linda Jenckes of the Health Insurance Association of America attempts to don a servant girl smile and tells millions of Americans: "You know, we actually support more in the president's proposal than probably any organization...
...I would add two attributes essential for leadership today: courage of conviction and credibility...
...And I really love working with you, says Hillary...
...The book can be read as a series of selected short stories, and each category stands on its own...
...We want health care reform...
...Who were these presidents' followers...
...Which brings me to the question that I wish Wills, who has written so perceptively on Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy, had confronted in this book: Why are we not producing the kinds of leaders that founded the nation and led it through its finest hours...
...FDR faced the Great Depression and World War II...
...This after her organization just spent $10 million on the "Harry & Louise" ads that pilloried the Clinton plan...
...He is founding chairman and president of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University...
...was President Johnson's top assistant for domestic affairs and President Carter's secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...Other characters are presented in new light: Eleanor's childhood "behavior was calculated to win sympathy, yet there was something in Eleanor—a combination of smugness, vulnerability, obtuseness, not to speak of an ability to absorb emotional pain—that made an individual like Alice [Roosevelt Longworth] want to punish her...
...In 1965, he vainly ran for mayor of Miami Beach and was rumored to be close to the gangster Meyer Lansky...
...Senator Feinstein refuses to accept the invitation, leaving viewers to wonder—or so Mr...
...All you need to enjoy the performance is a television, a cable hook-up, and a remote control...
...Lyndon Johnson, whom Wills dismisses as a "superb Senate leader" but "a poor president," revolutionized the nation with his commitment to civil rights (with laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accomodations, housing, and protecting voting rights, and his articulation of the concept of affirmative action and of the need for a war on poverty amidst such plenty...
...The once-mighty tobacco lobby is itself in turmoil as Congress moves to boost the federal tax on tobacco and to investigate charges that the tobacco industry put extra nicotine in its cigarettes...
...LaPierre hopes— what it is she's hiding from...
...Turns out that the Rover who died was actually the marine commandant's dog, and Naylor winds up working for the tobacco industry...
...While The Roosevelts lacks the grandeur and depth of the Collier-Horowitz treatments of the Rockefellers and Kennedys, it benefits from Collier's considerable intelligence and research skills...
...Political Booknotes Thank You for Smoking Christopher Buckley Random House, $22 By Alan Murray The reason good Washington satire is so rare is that Washington does such a good job of satirizing itself...
...Going where...
...Alan Murray is Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal...
...The Roosevelts: An American Saga Peter Collier with David Horowitz Simon and Schuster, $27.50 By Michael R. Beschloss Since their days as the editors of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s (they have now renounced their radical backgrounds and support others who follow suit), Peter Collier and David Horowitz have written a substantial subliterature on American dynasties...
...Martha Graham against Madonna...
...Instead, lack of discipline and tactical skills killed his career in New York politics so that by 1960 he was reduced to exploiting his family name to help John Kennedy overcome the skepticism of West Virginia primary voters...
...Published just after the 1984 drug death of Robert Kennedy's son David, with whom the authors had spoken at length, The Kennedys showed the human cost that Joseph Kennedy's insatiable drives exacted from his children and grandchildren...
...Ross Perot versus Roger Smith...
...The decline and fall of the FDR side was more fabulous...
...unlike today, not every idea was assumed to have some merit...
...For me the answer rests, in part, with us, the followers...
...Wills plays Franklin Roosevelt against Adlai Stevenson...
...John Gardner makes a somewhat different point...
...His goal was to stop the federal government from getting more deeply into the pants of American society and business...
...By the late sixties, LBJ had spent the largest election plurality in history to help blacks and wage war in Vietnam, and he lost his conservative followers over civil rights and his liberal ones over the Vietnam War...
...As with the earlier volumes, Collier is most interesting on the figures to whom history has paid less attention— for instance, Eleanor Roosevelt's father Elliott, who drank and was "the leading character in what had become the families' ongoing melodrama...
...Elected to Congress from New York City in a special election in 1949, endowed with his father's magnetism, looks, and voice, he was considered to be an almost certain future presidential nominee...
...You've done so much to address the problems in the health care system, coos Tipper...
...For Roosevelt on the war it was all the people, but after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that was as easy as crossing the untrafficked streets of 1941...
...Naylor then goes on television and announces the president is dead...
...Martin Luther King gets the leadership prize for rhetoric...
...In stark colors, Collier portrays Franklin and Eleanor's deficiencies as parents, describing how FDR "mistakenly assumed" that his daughter and sons "would not feel entangled in the dark undergrowth of emotion that characterized his relationship to Eleanor...
...Thank You for Smoking and Buckley's previous book, The White House Mess, establish him as the city's preeminent satirist...
...He writes that the TR side felt that their name "was being degraded by the financial misdeeds and especially by the marital failures of those other Roosevelts...
...Certain Trumpets Garry Wills Simon and Schuster, $23 By Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...Leadership in our increasingly fragmented society, with its premium on aggressive pluralism—economic, social, cultural, and religious—is a more difficult task than at any time since the Civil War...
...In FDR's time there were far sharper, widely accepted demarcations of good and evil...
...As he brought out of the closet 200 years of brutalizing blacks and exhorted the nation to right the wrongs, he tackled an issue so controversial and sought to change a feeling so deeply ingrained that it remains the nation's most divisive to this day...
...Click back a few days and there's First Lady Hillary Clinton, on "Larry King Live," having an intimate conversation with Second Lady Tipper Gore, who just happened to call in...
...LaPierre knows that persistence wins over logic in Washington...
...This from a woman who a few days earlier was talking about protecting her "zone of privacy...
...Of his books on his late mother, Elliott joked, "See, she's still supporting me after all these years...
...Mining the huge literature on Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and sundry aspects of their families, as well as private papers and interviews with descendants, the book breaks with usual practice by treating the often bitterly opposed TR and FDR branches as one, closing with a 1989 Hyde Park rapprochement that family members gibed as "the Peace of Utrecht...
...He brought millions of Americans under his conservative banner and shifted the center of American politics to the right Where were these leaders going...
...But it's not until near the end that he zeroes in on two key questions in understanding effective leadership: "Leader of whom...
...His career there founders until he is invited to appear on "Oprah," where he tells a terminal cancer victim, and two anti-smoking activists, in Linda Jenckes fashion: "Look, we're all on the same side here...
...In this tale of a newsman-turned-tobacco-flack, Buckley shows himself to have an unmatched eye for the culture of Washington politics, media, and media manipulators...
...Wills admits that he offers little for those seeking to answer the question, "How am I to become a leader...
...Lest all this serve only to feed already excessive public cynicism about Washington, it is worth pointing out that some of the nation's least savory special interests have been handed some major defeats in recent months...
...They have chosen to adore a president who obstructed justice, was a criminal co-conspirator in an attempt to destroy the opposition political party, made a calculated judgment to exacerbate racism as part of his Southern strategy, and was the only president who had to resign in disgrace after the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, voted the first article of impeachment against him...
...Wills puts it this way: "My book has missed its object if the role of the follower is made somehow less worthy than that of the leader...
...Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...Just what that would prove is unclear, but Mr...
...Richard Dreyfuss' issues person was also on board, having given a presentation to the cabinet on Richard's feelings about health care reform...
...FDR is shown as "a blithe spirit and a figure of tremendous power, yet paradoxically unable to protect [his children]—not from tyrannical nannies, not from their mother's painful deficits, and not from his own relentless desire to pretend everything was fine, his way of conserving the core of privacy he had won with such difficulty...
...The followers have gone well beyond paying due respect to the office and the man...
...Reagan's followers were white and conservative, with a core of evangelicals...
...there remains plenty of grist for satirists...
...I love working with you so much, says Tipper...
...Three recent presidents have profoundly affected our nation by their leadership—and each was quite different in style, in substance, and the issues on which he sought to lead...
...For instance, after bravery during World War II, son Elliott, trying to be a "big man," went through a number of wives, panhandled his mother and other family members for cash, wrote questionable "memoirs" about his parents with invented dialogue—making profits while cutting them down to size—then put his name on a series of cheap ghost-written "Eleanor Roosevelt Mysteries...
...The Roosevelts is at least a partial return to the tradition of their first two books...
...But for anyone who fails to see the absurdities of life here, Christopher Buckley's Thank You for Smoking is a brilliant antidote...
...And the once-mighty National Rifle Association has been handed two recent defeats, with Congress passing the Brady Bill and the ban on certain assault weapons...
...The writing is lively, literate, and full of interesting tidbits about the lives of each person he caricatures as leader or antitype...
...And it just may be that satire will prove the most effective weapon against the purveyors of hypocrisy and cynicism...
...Despite the credit line, it has evidently been written by Collier alone (in his author's note, he thanks "my good old friend David Horowitz for his help in rounding up some of the material in the first stages of this book...
...is perhaps an even better emblem of the collapsed ambitions of the FDR line...
...Bluntly put, American followers get the kind of leadership they deserve by the standards they set...
...On a flight to Los Angeles, for instance, Naylor recognizes Barbra Streisand's "issues person," whom he heard had been flown in to brief the National Security Council on Barbra's position on the developing Syrian situation...
...Bill Clinton may not have had much success in changing the culture of Washington, but perhaps Chris Buckley will...
...Enter, in 1980, Reagan...
...And he altered forever the role of the federal government (with Medicare, Medicaid, aid to elementary, secondary, and higher education, and environmental, consumer, and crime control laws...
...Will you come to the range...
...As Charles Peters, the editor of this magazine, wrote in his autobiography, "Roosevelt had become a drunk, and now Kennedy was fulfilling FDR Jr.'s once bright promise...
...Michael R. Beschloss is the author, most recently, of The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (Harper, 1991...
...Breaking that mold, Collier and Horowitz have performed the extraordinary task of getting reticent people to talk about their lives, their minds, and their relatives as well as deconstructing the densely packed array of ambitions, anxieties, responsibilities, traumas, and opportunities thrown on the rich and famous from birth...
...Later, Ronald Reagan set out to stem the expansion of the federal role in American life...
...In The Rockefellers (1976), they showed how the great-grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller grew up to be wildly different from their patriarch and from one another, despite the strong efforts of that family's infrastructure to imprint them with common values, manners, and goals...
...Franklin Roosevelt, Jr...
...Johnson's goal was a society that acted in accord with its stated constitutional principles of equality and opportunity and justice for all...
...The Fords (1987) was more cursory and brisk, largely because that family, on closer inspection, did not prove to have the intensity and depth that had allowed Collier and Horowitz to weave the two earlier tales, tales that were almost out of Thomas Mann...
...Dorothy Day, the doyenne of the Catholic Worker movement, gets the gold for saintly leadership...
...By cutting taxes, he fenced Democrats into a budget corral that is likely to restrain domestic spending for the rest of the century...
...P]eople want to know whether the followers believe in the leader...
...Collier renders the TR branch's antagonism toward FDR as president ("What they had been saying for almost twenty years" was that "the Hyde Park branch was not just an inferior copy of the original, but a forgery") as partially political, partially a sense of dethronement...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 6
